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Rationally Speaking is a blog maintained by Prof. Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City University of New York. The blog reflects the Enlightenment figure Marquis de Condorcet's idea of what a public intellectual (yes, we know, that's such a bad word) ought to be: someone who devotes himself to "the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them." You're welcome. Please notice that the contents of this blog can be reprinted under the standard Creative Commons license.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

One more take on the role of intuition in philosophy

by Massimo Pigliucci

www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton

Julia — over at her Measure of Doubt blog — has reopened our discussion concerning the use and misuse of intuition in philosophy, which originally started in an episode of the Rationally Speaking podcast (the first two rounds of our discussion after that can be found here and here). Since I chided her for cherry picking examples in her critique, this time she relies on a (as yet unpublished, but available as an online preview) paper by J.R. and J.R.C. Kuntz, to appear in the Review of Philosophical Psychology. (Wow, a whole journal devoted to that? At any rate, here is the link to the article, since Julia provided her readers only with access to the abstract. You will need academic library access if you don't want to purchase the paper.)

I will first stake out my own view about the role of intuitions in philosophy, then briefly comment on Julia’s post, and finally go into some details in the Kuntz’s paper, which is characterized by modest results and a number of methodological flaws (but which nonetheless does manage to make a couple of good points to which philosophers should pay attention).

As the Kuntz’s make clear, intuitions can play two distinct roles in philosophy (or, for that matter, in anything else, including science): one in what philosophers of science call the context of discovery — providing the starting point from which logic (or empirical evidence, in the case of science) take off — and one in the context of justification, i.e., as data used to test hypotheses. The former is not only perfectly justified, but in fact inevitable. Galileo’s and Einstein’s thought experiments began as intuitions, and so does much valuable research in science and scholarship in philosophy. Hilary Putnam’s famous thought experiment about a twin earth can be used as a good exercise to make explicit, and if necessary to criticize, reject or modify, our thinking about language and its referents. However, intuitions cannot and should not be used as data to test hypotheses or draw conclusions, because they are not epistemically reliable — hence the silliness of David Chalmers’ zombies, which tells us precisely nothing about consciousness, as I have argued before.

There is a second important distinction that needs to be made when talking about the role of intuitions in any specialized field, since failing to acknowledge its import makes for some unnecessary confusion in both Julia’s essay and the Kuntz’s paper. I am referring to the distinction between the intuitions of professionals and those of lay “folks” (to use the Kuntz’s terminology). Pace much (again, in my opinion, hyped) clamor about experimental philosophy (an oxymoron actually referring to psychological research on concepts relevant to philosophy), it matters exactly zero what folk intuitions about free will, twin earths, Chinese rooms and the like are, just as it matters zero what folk intuitions about logic, mathematics, physics or the game of chess are to the practices in those fields. As for the intuitions of experts, there is plenty of cognitive science literature (developed from studying chess players, math teachers and nurses, among others) showing that intuitions in one’s domain of expertise become increasingly reliable the longer one has been practicing in that domain. (Interestingly, it takes several thousands of hours of practice to develop intuitive skills equivalent to those of a good chess player, and thousands more to achieve equivalency with a grand master.)

Now back to Julia’s essay. Despite my warning about cherry picking, she does it again right at the beginning, mentioning Chalmers’ zombies and a pretty risible claim by G.E. Moore about the desirability of a clean over a dirty planet even if there were nobody around to enjoy the landscape. By the same token, I could easily compile a large list of blunders by scientists and declare the whole enterprise in deep trouble (actually, someone has already done the compiling, see this delightful book about science’s greatest mistakes).

Julia then cites one of the major findings of the paper, that 51% of the philosophers sampled by the Kuntzs (see below for methodological issues) think that intuitions are useful in philosophical justification. She however waits until the very end of her essay to mention that a whopping 83% of respondents thought that intuitions are useful in discovery (not justification) and does not report at all that 70% of philosophers think that intuitions are not essential to justification. Julia, however, does acknowledge that philosophers of science seem to be particularly skeptical of the role of intuition in the context of justification. Kudos to ourselves, my dear colleagues.

Okay, to the meat of the matter now: the Kuntz’s paper itself. Other than the findings already mentioned, the most visible result is that philosophers seem to prefer two of the seven accounts of intuitions that were provided to them by the researchers, while they largely dislike two more. He are the Kuntz’s seven conceptions of intuitions, as presented in their survey:

1) Judgment that is not made on the basis of some kind of observable and explicit reasoning process.

2) An intellectual happening whereby it seems that something is the case without arising from reasoning, or sensorial perceiving, or remembering.

3) A propositional attitude that is held with some degree of conviction, and solely on the basis of one’s understanding of the proposition in question, not on the basis of some belief.

4) An intellectual act whereby one is thinking occurrently [sic] of the abstract proposition that p and, merely on the basis of understanding it, believes that p.

5) An intellectual state made up of (1) the consideration whether p and (2) positive phenomenological qualities that count as evidence for p; together constituting prima facie reason to believe that p.

6) The formation of a belief by unclouded mental attention to its contents, in a way that is so easy and yielding a belief that is so definite as to leave no room for doubt regarding its veracity.

7) An intellectual happening that serves as evidence for the situation at hand’s instantiation of some concept.

A majority of respondents liked (1) and (2) and dislike (6) and (7) which, despite some quibbling on the part of the Kuntz’s, actually indicates that philosophers tend to have somewhat consistent views of what intuitions are. However, the problem here is that it is not at all clear how, at a conceptually deep level, these ideas of intuition are in fact different from each other (they are certainly not identical, but several could be taken to be overlapping, and indeed even almost identical once the complex and sometimes obfuscatory language is stripped away).

So far, the results of the study aren’t that bad for philosophers: a majority, especially of philosophers of science, thinks that intuitions are useful in discovery more than justification, and there is some agreement about what intuitions actually are (though I’d be curious to see what one would find by asking scientists about the type of intuitions that inform their discovery phase). The real problems with the paper are methodological.

To begin with, this was a voluntary online survey. Bad idea. The sample (which isn’t that large to begin with, only 282 people) is very likely to be self-selected in terms of interest in the topic and other criteria (such as level of online activity, which is still relatively low in the humanities, especially among older faculty) and areas of expertise within philosophy (the Kuntz’s do address the latter problem, but claim that their sample is not likely to be biased based, unfortunately, on yet another online survey, and one conducted by a philosopher — Chalmers — not a social scientist!).

Moreover, we discover that an (unreported) number of participants had not actually finished their PhD, raising the question of the extent to which this is in fact a survey of professionals (see my comment above about how many thousands of hours are necessary to develop expert intuitions). To complicate things further, some sub-areas of Philosophy included in the analysis were barely represented at all (e.g., aesthetic, n=3; postmodernism, n=2; education, n=3; feminism, n=1; philosophy of literature, n=1; philosophy of mathematics, n=5; Philosophy of religion, n=4; law, n=3; and so on).

The descriptive statistics of the survey are not problematic (they simply report the rankings of the various options by participants, broken down by categories such as gender, geographical area, subfield of interest, etc.). But then we get to the bivariate correlations among variables (measured as Spearman’s non parametric rho), such as the relationship between the importance attributed to intuition and the preference for one or another of the seven types of intuitions from the menu described above. While all correlations discussed by the Kuntz’s are statistically significant (as much as I personally put little faith in p-value based statistics), the effect sizes seem pretty tiny. A good number of the coefficients are in the 0.15-0.20 range, indicating very weak correlations. It would have been nice to know what the percentage of explained variance of one variable by the other was, the so-called coefficient of determination, but that’s not available because the Kuntz’s didn’t do a parametric analysis, which is necessary to estimate these coefficients.

Then again, didn’t they? Toward the end of the results section they mention an analysis of variance, which is a parametric procedure. So, then, were the data approximately normally distributed, so that ANOVAs were possible? But if so, why use Spearman’s rho for the correlations, since non parametric statistics are known to be less powerful and ought not to be deployed if the data even approximately satisfy parametric assumptions? And why don’t the authors report the results of the ANOVAs in a table, instead of simply briefly summarizing their results verbally?

In the end, I don’t think we’ve learned much from the Kuntz’s paper about philosophers and intuitions, other than being reminded of the valuable conceptual point that everybody interested in either using or studying intuitions ought to make very clear the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification. And the paper certainly lends very little support to Julia’s sweeping critique of "philosophers" for using an epistemically unreliable method.

Here, I am with Henri Poincaré (quoted by the Kuntz’s) when he wrote back in 1908 that “It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover.” Which is true also for formal logic and math. Substitute “empirical evidence’ for “logic” in the quote, and you get science.

All seven of those "conceptions of intuitions" are wrong. We do almost all of our thinking subconsciously, and consciously when we have need to examine, re-examine, and make use of it.

The dictionary tells us that intuition is the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning. Which is also wrong. We simply think unconsciously much much faster than when we consciously use symbolic language to examine the results.

You've torn down Julia's empirical claim that the majority of philosophers accept intuition in the context of justification, but you and her have missed the broader claim: Philosophy should be judged by its output rather than its participants (thereby progressing), and if those participants hold irrational beliefs the quality of the output will be reduced. You're both sort of skirmishing on the edges of that claim.

So, in which areas of philosophy could intuition affect the output? In those areas, what percentage of philosophers irrationally think intuition is useful in certain contexts? For intance, if the use of intuition for justification is significantly less accepted in Philosophy of Science, and that's the only relevant field, then Julia's criticism would be almost meaningless.

Does a field with irrational participants produce lower quality output? Maybe a field with 10% irrational participants generates more competition and thereby higher quality output. On the other hand, if the percentage goes above some threshold (say 51%) does the field become effectively useless? Maybe not given the incentive structure for academia.

first off: why exactly are all the definitions of intuitions given above wrong? They strike me as all (partially) correct. Second, what's your definition of it?

Eid,

that is a good question, but hardly specific to philosophy. Non-rational approaches to knowledge are well known in all field, science included. The question is: does the field make progress when practiced at its best? I have argued on RS that the answer is yes, though of course progress in philosophy cannot and should not be measured by the standards of science (because the disciplines have different aims and methods):

1) Judgment that is not made on the basis of some kind of observable and explicit reasoning process.

We subconsciously use a predictive reasoning process similar to Bayesian induction. As explicit a process as any logical system and observable by the clarity of its inference.

2) An intellectual happening whereby it seems that something is the case without arising from reasoning, or sensorial perceiving, or remembering.

It doesn't seem that to anyone who is aware that the bulk of our reasoning is done subconsciously, and arises from sensorial perceiving and memory as much or more as does conscious thought.

3) A propositional attitude that is held with some degree of conviction, and solely on the basis of one’s understanding of the proposition in question, not on the basis of some belief.

Our subconscious thinking is likely more based on belief than our conscious.

4) An intellectual act whereby one is thinking occurrently [sic] of the abstract proposition that p and, merely on the basis of understanding it, believes that p.

We subconsciously prepare as many analytical arguments as we iterate consciously.

5) An intellectual state made up of (1) the consideration whether p and (2) positive phenomenological qualities that count as evidence for p; together constituting prima facie reason to believe that p.

We do much more subconsciously and intuitively than introduce the prima facie to our consciousness. (And the subconscious is seen by some as the final arbiter.)

6) The formation of a belief by unclouded mental attention to its contents, in a way that is so easy and yielding a belief that is so definite as to leave no room for doubt regarding its veracity.

Doubt is the reason we have evolved our conscious thought processes.

7) An intellectual happening that serves as evidence for the situation at hand’s instantiation of some concept.

It only seems to the conscious part of the mind that the unconscious process is instantaneous.

Of course my question isn't specific to philosophy, and I didn't mean to imply that it was. You say non-rational approaches to knowledge aren't atypical, and I, of course, agree. But that wasn't my point. However, a corollary of my point is that the approach is unimportant if it doesn't significantly affect the quality of the output.

You say the question is if the field makes progress when practiced at its best. I don't agree. I'm confident that's obviously true, and I'm puzzled that anyone that could claim the opposite. I say the question is: how do irrational participants affect the quality of the output produced by a progressing system (such as philosophy, science, and so on).

This is the question because it's the only question where irrational elements, such as intuition in the context of justification, matter.

I don;t find your objections to the various concepts of intuition compelling at all. In most cases you are making a statement that is perfectly compatible with the definition you intend to criticize, only phrase differently.

For instance:

"1) Judgment that is not made on the basis of some kind of observable and explicit reasoning process.

We subconsciously use a predictive reasoning process similar to Bayesian induction. As explicit a process as any logical system and observable by the clarity of its inference."

We may or may not think in a Bayesian fashion (this is far from being an ascertained fact), but even if we do the process is certainly not observable to our consciousness, by definition of "unconscious." And so on for the others.

Well, Massimo, you picked on my most debatable argument, and pronounced the rest of them wrong by that example. However, I could cite numerous references for those in the field that agree with me, especially that our subconscious thinking is likely more based on belief than our conscious. But as you like to remind us, it's your blog, and your say so.

don't be silly about "this is my blog." As you know, that applies only to posts that I think are out of bounds in terms of courtesy, not to content. I didn't dismiss your points by example, I simply had time to only show where you went wrong in one of your cases, I think you are wrong on the others for similar reasons. And your latest is yet another example:

> our subconscious thinking is likely more based on belief than our conscious. <

"3) A propositional attitude that is held with some degree of conviction, and solely on the basis of one’s understanding of the proposition in question, not on the basis of some belief.Our subconscious thinking is likely more based on belief than our conscious."

Seems contradictory to me, as well as to some as cited on Wikipedia:"2.Intuitions are a species of belief, and based ultimately in experience. This view holds that intuitions are not especially different from beliefs, although they appear subjectively to be more unrevisable than other beliefs. Unlike the previous view, these intuitions are liable to differ between social groups. Evidence for this is shown in various psychological studies (e.g. the one by Stich, Weinburg and Nichols)"

"However, intuitions cannot and should not be used as data to test hypotheses or draw conclusions, because they are not epistemically reliable . . . 70% of philosophers think that intuitions are not essential to justification . . . philosophers of science seem to be particularly skeptical of the role of intuition in the context of justification. Kudos to ourselves, my dear colleagues . . . Here, I am with Henri Poincaré (quoted by the Kuntz’s) when he wrote back in 1908 that “It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover.” Which is true also for formal logic and math. Substitute “empirical evidence’ for “logic” in the quote, and you get science."

Contra 70% of philosophers, the buck stops with intuition. "Empirical evidence" is relative to brute posits that are lent credulity on the basis of intuition (we must accept this on pain of infinite regress or vicious circularity). What precisely the counter-possibility is to this logical conclusion, no one knows. Until he thinks one up, Massimo would do best to maintain a dignified silence.

Attlee,Except that intuitions are quite logical to the extent that they are based on predictive probabilities and not your personal form of "deductive non-inference." The problem with intuition is beliefs, and with the ability of those such as yourself to rationalize them with your own delusive premises. You've been somehow left with those intuitive premises bereft of any insight into the subconscious logic that has used them as propositional, i.e., neither true nor false.

"we've already had this discussion, and even though you don't realize it, you lost. I'm not going to rehash the same points over and over. That would indeed be an example of (vicious) regress..."

Where would philosophy be without the art of ignoring objections? Possibly we had a discussion -- it was hard to tell what with all the logical fallacies flying around. More to my point, the rehashing of points was rather one-sided since you couldn't be bothered to actually confront any and all of the arguments put to you. You say that intuitions cannot and ought not be used as data to test hypotheses or draw conclusions -- what in Hume's name would be the alternative?

"70% of philosophers think that intuitions are not essential to justification"

Since 70% of philosophers have failed to provide a non-intuition-based theory of justification we must conclude that their collective dishonesty is merely yet another indictment of the irrepressible intellectual hucksterism that passes for "thought" at this pivotal stage in the pre-history of mankind.

You throw logical fallacies about like confetti, but you don't explain what sources of belief are such that we can logically infer their reliability without lapsing into epistemic circularity. Until you do this, dignified silence is your best pose.

Sorry Attlee, but we (you being the exception) can avoid the circularity paradox through inductive logic, regardless of Hume's alleged problem with it. Since obviously - all things to some degree illusional - most of us can get from is to ought. Life forms seem to have been doing that their way for eons. You won't understand that, but then you're just a foil at this point.

The logical deduction of an unjustifiable posit assented to by intuition is precisely transparent (even if not resonant); what a "non-circular certainty" is neither you nor Baron have explained, nor could you, for the phrase "non-circular certainty" is a mindless self-contradiction -- how could one be "certain" of anything, given the impossibility of a non-circular justification of the reliability of any experience whatsoever (perceptual, introspective, memorial, inferential, testimonial, (so-called) "intuitional" etc.)?

Attlee,I have the rational illusion that I cannot be reliably certain of anything. I'm aware, more consciously than such as you, that we and all other life forms have evolved to rely on the advantages of uncertainty.